Wagner right
RECORDS CHARLES REID
Wagner's Tannhauser has a subtitle, 'The Song Contest on the Wartburg.' In the record shops the contest now creeps at your wallet.
Five years ago HMV put out a four-disc ver- sion conducted by Franz Konwitschny, with Hans Hopf (name part), Elisabeth Grtimmer (heroine Elisabeth) and the Berlin State Opera and Chorus. The price was £8 4s. Two years later came a Philips version, cut from tapes of Bayreuth performances and conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. Anja Silja and Wolfgang Windgassen headed the cast. This was on three discs and cost only £5 12s 6d. The time four-disc version quickly disappeared from the catalogue, but is recently back (HQM 1081-4), reprocessed for improved sound and repriced at £5 Os 7d. Which version to go for?
The Philips has one obvious advantage. Off and on you feel you are sitting solidly and irrefutably in the Festspielhaus. Occasional coughs and sneezes heighten the fun. The Venusberg music goes like a typhoon. Dancers faintly thud and bump in the background. Great. I cannot agree, however, that Wind- gassen comes anything near to chucking Hopf, as has been claimed, out of the ring. Both are apt to be strained and uncomely on the ear. If you want a refresher on how mellifluous -a German tenor can sound, turn to Fritz
Wunderlich, may's Walter in the Hall of Song. Philips scores handsomely with Grace Bumbry (Venus) and-, among small parts. Franz Crass tBitterolf). For the rest. Griimmer, Fischer-Dieskau (Wolfram) and Gottlob Frick (Landgrave) phrase these decisive roles more authoritatively and suavely than their Bay retith counterparts 1Silja, Eberhardt Wachter and Josef Greindl). On strictly musical ground:. then, my vote goes to HMV.
From Decca another Britten opera : hi, set- ting of .4 Midsummer Night's Dream 1,471 338-40, six sides). The composer conducts a cast that includes six singers from the original production (Aldeburgh, 1960), though one of the six, Peter Pears, then Flute-Thisbe, is now Lysander, romantic lover.
Here is a case where quite half the beauty and dramatic illusion well up from the orchestra, here the London Symphony. It is therefore material to know which orchestral option has been followed, a point the accom- panying libretto book doesn't touch upon. At Aldeburgh seven years ago, as this year at Sadlers Wells, the English Opera Group put no more than a dozen strings into the pit. For this recording, as for the Covent Garden production (1961), string strength went up to forty or thereabouts. And, I exclaim, listen- ing among other things to the rich three-part writing for violins and the cello-contrabass chords at the beginning of Act 3, a good thing too. Musical detail, timbre, surface finish and evocative power amount to model production and engineering.
Salient performances are those of Josephine Veasey (Hermia), Mr Pears, Elizabeth Harwood (Tytania) and Owen Brannigan (Bottom). About some of the other singing 1 am less than user- board. That is partly because much of the Dream is ungrateful stuff to sing as well as freakishly- 'distributed.' Alfred Deller is Oberon. It was he who 'created' the role. His scrupulous artistry is more striking than ever. Yet neither Mr Denier nor either of his colleagues, Mr Oberlin and Mr Bowman, has converted me to the upstaging of counter-tenor, one thing on the cushioning airs of a cathedral nave, quite another when spotlit and in full theatrical fig.
Now something you can truly get your teeth into. Volume 5 of RCA'S dig-up, The ToscanMi Treasury of Great Music (vcM 5/1-4, eight sides) is Wagner all the way: prelude and interlude music from Lohengrin up to Sieg- fried's Funeral March and the Good Friday Spell. The entire duet scene from Walkiire. Act I, is followed by hunks of Gotierddm- merung, including the Briinnhilde-Siegfried duet. These latter exhumations are from 1941 and, though evidently reprocessed, often sound like it. At fifty or over Melchior still had a heldentenor to make most rivals sit up, and Helen Traubel's soprano was in bright. full torrent. The point for the connoisseur (and for the plain man) is, however, the Maestro. Sometimes Toscanini is slower, sometimes quicker, than most Wagner conductors, and he's capable (unless 1941 engineering's to blame) of making his trumpets sound like cornets in a municipal bandstand. But the magic, account for it as you may, is indisput- able. Grandeur. thought-span, depth, thunder- bolt.... In sum. a lesson for all time in musical 'philosophy.'
Operatic round-off: Fleanor Suliotis, Greek soprano, in arias by Donizetti and Verdi tDecca sxt. 6306). Here are a voice and talent that. nail me to the furniture. Lariats of dazzling tone above the stave. Below it sepul- chral timbres which are startling in a twenty- four-year-old and superb by any standard. No point in comparing her with Moffo or Leon- tyne, Rcnata or Maria. Suliotis is Suliotis and that's that. Incidental inelegances, an ingenuous touch here and there, are part of her charisma (blessed word). 1 wouldn't be without them.
Other good things:
Charles lees. Piano Sonata No I, played by William Masselos (RCA SB 6709). Five move- ments on two long-playing sides. Bowled over, I picked myself up and played it twice more without break. Composed between 1902 and 1910, Sonata No 1, like much orchestral music that Ives was incubating at the same time, is miles ahead of contemporary taste and prac- tice in harmony, rhythm and texture. Yet it is every man's music, any man's music. Jazz evocations, sardonic or sentimental, are sand- wiched between rummagings, rumblings and polyphonic gravities. Masselos gives what the score asks for, a touch ranging from pile- driver and penumatic pick to thistledown.
Minor Prokoviev orgy. Symphony No 3 and the Scythian Suite arc done by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony (RCA se 6705); movements from the Romeo and Juliet and Chout ballets by Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony (Decca sm. 6286). Crafts- manly and spanking accounts of 'outdated' music whose grip and entertainment value are good for decades yet.
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